Operations management methods and devices thereof in information-processing systems

Abstract

Total power consumption of information-processing devices and power supply / cooling facilities is reduced to realize energy saving operation of information-processing system. The information-processing system includes information-processing devices, power supply facilities, cooling facilities and an operations management device. The operations management device is connected to the devices and the facilities and includes layout information constituted of locations and operating information of the devices and locations and environmental information of the facilities. Also, the operations management device obtains the power consumption of the devices, the power supply loss of the power supply facilities and the cooling power of the cooling facilities by using the layout information, and then allocates the workloads to the devices so as to reduce the total sum of power consumption, supply loss and cooling power.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION[0001]The present application claims priority from Japanese Patent Application No. JP 2008-100927 filed on Apr. 9, 2008, the content of which is hereby incorporated by reference into this application.TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]The present invention relates to operations management methods and devices thereof in information-processing systems constituted of information-processing devices such as servers, storage units and networks and facilities for supplying power to or cooling the same. More particularly, it relates to a technique preferable for synthetic energy saving operation management for the information-processing devices and the facilities.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]According to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2004-126968 (patent document 1), in a management server which executes job scheduling for a parallel computer system, a new job is input to a computer at low temperature based on temperature s...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0008]For the energy saving of the data center, various measures have been taken for information-processing devices such as servers, storages, networks, power supply facilities, cooling facilities and system operations management. In the information-processing device, its performance per power consumption has been improved by the use of low power devices and circuits, and the adoption of the energy saving function by switching of operation / idle states in accordance with a workload has been accelerated. In the power supply facilities, reduction of power supply loss in the power supply system from an electric transformer, uninterruptible power supply system, power distribution panel and distributor to the power supplies of the devices and improvement of transformation efficiency have been carried out. In the cooling facilities, improvement of the operating efficiency of the air conditioner itself, optimization of air flow design at intake / discharge ports and introduction of localized cooling and liquid cooling have started recently. In the operations management, operations information monitoring, job scheduling and operations efficiency improvement and consolidation of the devices by virtualization have been mentioned as main measures.

[0043]The effects obtained by typical one of the inventions disclosed in this application will be briefly described below. For example, in the information-processing system like a data center, the total power consumption of the devices and facilities can be reduced by operations management in which the information-processing devices and the facilities are linked with each other.

Problems solved by technology

With rapid progress of information communication in recent years and toward the integration era of broadcasting and communication, information-processing devices are expected to increase explosively.

Particularly in a data center which bears the information processing foundation at a back end, in addition to the electric power consumed by the information-processing devices, the electric power consumed by the facilities for supplying power or cooling accounts for a large proportion of the electric power consumed in the data center, and the synthetic reduction of the electric power of the devices and facilities has been an important issue.

Images